Apple Tree
by newfishlin
Summary: He had found her once again, once again. And he knew that it was the flow of the world to lead him back to her even if he wanted to escape.
1. Chapter 1

**AN: my first mushishi fanfiction! :D Haven't finished the series yet, but I'm already in love with it.  
**

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That night, before the rosy fingers of dawn had broken through the curtains of darkness Ginko had a dream. Such a dream it was that Ginko cried. It was so powerful a dream, that the mushi that usually surrounded Ginko stopped bustling about for a moment in respect for the mushi master's distress.

And it began like this:

He was in a dark room, with a woman whose face he could not see. They sat before a window and the moonlight cast shadows on her face that he did not dare see past. She would always chuckle at him, as if he had made an amusing remark, and tip-toe porcelain fingers along the sides of his face. Something about her made him heavy with grief- an emotion he had not felt in a long while.

_"If you want me to, I'll tell you a story."_ She always spoke like she had secret meanings behind her words, whispers sliding in and out of her syllables like shadows. But it was intriguing and Ginko had always felt so compelled to reply so that he could hear her voice again.

So Ginko would crane his head to ask_, "… Is it a good story?"_

_" It's the noblest story ever told. It's about you and about me. You're more important than you think you see, to have such a tale told about you."_

_"About me?"_

She would bend down to kiss the tip of his nose before continuing, for he was lying on her lap. _  
_

_" Yes it's not complete yet though, because the hero is still on his journey today."_

_" What kind of journey?"_ Ginko was already on a journey of his own, but this was in a time before he had known. Here the dream would continue without him, and Ginko seemed to watch his body from afar, cradled in the woman's lap respond.

_" A sad and hard journey. But it's a happy ending, I promise."_

_"… Did the hero cry?"  
_

_" He shed many tears. But he left them where he lost them and continued on his journey regardless." _The woman would trace tears on his face, and Ginko felt them despite being far in another corner of the room. The butterfly feeling of her traced tears made him shiver. _  
_

_" Heroes don't cry. They're smart and loved and beautiful. They don't cry." _Ginko remembered how much he had loathed the white hair and green eyes he had been endowed with in the beginning. _  
_

_"… Yes they do. They might be all that you say they are but they can't see it for themselves. Many heroes feel_  
_small and lost and ugly. They cry and hurt as much as any body else, but they still must journey on."_

_" Sounds like a bad story to me."_

She would pause here, as if she knew something was going to happen. Ginko felt something tug at him, and he found himself in her lap again, right when the moonlight seemed to shift the shadows away from her face. The woman would smile and Ginko would hear these words before returning back to consciousness. _  
_

_" It always seems like a bad story in the beginning, when you haven't seen the happy ending."_

Awakening in the forest with the feel of her butterfly tears on his cheek, Ginko opened his eyes to the bleary morning with only one name on his lips: _Ringo. _

_

* * *

_Ringo was a girl that he had encountered at the very beginning of his journey to exist. Ginko believed in nothing but the flow of the world and he was sure that it had brought him to her doorstep by fate. If he was meant to come this way, he would go.

But he was younger back then, and naive. When Ginko was crossing a bridge in a storm, the river had swept the bridge away, carrying Ginko with its rough current to the shores of an unknown land. He was washed up on the shores, and Ginko wandered the mountains for days in search of water and food before collapsing on a road.

The feel of a foot prodding into his side had woken him abruptly. Ginko looked up, eyes clouded from lack of nourishment, to see a young girl carrying a bucket of apples kicking his sides, ruining his already dirty white shirt.

He tried to paw her foot off. When he was younger, he still had the capacity to feel annoyance and had croaked out in his dehydrated voice: " Hey... you.. stop that."

The girl ignored him- kicking him again, this time replying with words that Ginko couldn't hear. His ears were ringing. " What .. did you say?"She sighed and put down her bucket of apples, before untying a pouch that was strapped to her waist. She slid an arm around his neck and held a gourd to his lips. It was water. He could smell he drank in large gulps, supported by the girl's slender frame.

Ginko felt himself come back to consciousness and turned his head to take a good look at the stranger who had helped him. She was so kind. So Ginko blinked slowly with his one green eye, about to utter words of gratitude before the world began to spin again. His head landed on the girl's shoulder and Ginko felt his mind dimming again with fatigue. He had felt her chest heave with a heavy sigh then. He remembered being supported by her as she looped his arm around her shoulder, and uttering these words instead of a proper thank you:

" You smell.. like apples."

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continued in chapter two ...


	2. Chapter 2

**AN: I always fantasized about Ginko having a tragic, terribly romantic past. It's just my inner fangirl speaking. So here we are, thank you please review! **

**

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**" Your eyes and your hair kind of make you look like a freak."

_So much for first impressions. _

Ginko winced into consciousness at the sound of the girl's comment, his 'freakish' green eyes slowly pulling open to see a young girl bending over him. The girl didn't seem that much younger than him, maybe sixteen- maybe fifteen. She had long brown hair that was tied into a braid that looked roughly tied, like a sailor's rushed knot. Like someone was drowning and the life saving rope didn't have any time to spare before getting in the water. Her face was pale and small, her main attribute her large brown eyes, staring quizzically at him like he was some kind of never before seen mushi.

" It's like you dived into a river and had all your color washed away or something."she said.

Ginko attempted to get up, but to no avail, his head still felt like it was swimming in the river. " Ugh..."

She sighed, pushing him down quickly, no mercy spared for his condition. " Now don't you go getting up, you're not going to better for a long while. You've had a fever for around a week now and we've had to attend to you. If you get sick again on us, I might consider dumping you back where I found you."

Ginko panicked. A week? The mushi must have been piling up in the area then- especially if he was unconscious. Wait.. " We?" he asked. " Who's we?"

The girl smiled. " The people of my village of course! We've been taking care of you this whole time. I'm Ringo by the way. I was named for the apple trees, because my mother loves them."

When Ginko thought back to it, he didn't know why he had paused at that moment. Maybe it's because it was the first time he had been so close to a girl that was around his age. And that she smelled like apples. He had stared at her, captivated for a second. _She smiled_, he found himself thinking. Her smile is nice. It was really okay, in the way that it was kind of uncharacteristic of her- her smile lit up her big brown eyes and weren't sarcastic at all.

He wanted her to smile again.

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Ginko ended up staying in her village for a while after that. Ringo was sixteen years old, only one year younger than he had been at the time. She lived alone because her parents had died early on in her life, but it didn't bother her because the villagers took care of her like a giant family would.

He had been bothered by the girl in the beginning, to be honest. And she didn't seem fond of him either. Her personality- blunt, brash, mischievous, sarcastic, whimsical- they clashed with his personality so often that it set his teeth on edge in the beginning. But there was one thing that she was gentle with, and Ginko often found himself watching her from inside the hut when she was. Her smile still had the same effect on him as it did that very first day. His green eyes would follow her as she went to pick the apples that grew in the orchard next to the village. Her father had planted it for her, she would say. She would gently drop an apple into her basket and tell him the story of their deaths. It was tragic, how her mother had died in childbirth and how her father had committed suicide afterwards, but Ringo treated it lightly. She told him that she didn't hate her father, but he could see the faltering truth behind her eyes.

She seemed so gentle and fragile at times like those, and Ginko realized that he had a slowly building urge to hold her in his arms. Ringo was a master story teller, and they would sit together admiring _her_ tree as she told stories of times long past- of fairy tales- of princesses and spirits. Each night he would fall asleep, head full of adventures she had told him- and more importantly he went to bed with thoughts full of her. Those days reality was difficult to tell apart from dreams, because seeing Ringo smile made him feel as if he wished to be happy and listen to her stories for an eternity.

One day, around four months after his arrival, Ringo fell sick. Many villagers fell sick as well, and the epidemic was slowly building throughout the village. Ginko soon found himself and a few other elder villagers to be the only ones healthy.

Ringo suffered from black outs daily and Ginko spent nights by her bedside, green eyes trained in distress at the young girl.

_What was going on? _

She would break out in cold sweat, and call desperately for her tree. Even though she was unwell, Ginko eventually caved in, unable to bear her cries any longer. Ringo's condition was getting worse by the carried her out on his back, and she pounded her fists hard against the white of his shirt.

" I want to see my apple tree..." she said in pain.

" ... Yes, yes Ringo, I'm bringing you there." In the dark of the night, the orchard seemed to be a sinister place, teeming with unknown life. Her apple tree was appearing though, and Ginko noticed that a strange glow emitted from it.

Right when she saw it, Ringo stopped her cries. She struggled to get out of Ginko's grasp. But he held her back, concerned about the tree's unearthly glow.

" Gah- Ringo, just wait one- ah!" Ginko let go when Ringo bit his arm. She slid down clumsily, running closer to the tree. Ginko rubbed his arm, eying the girl in frustration. " Are you an animal?..."

Ringo was strangely quiet as she approached the tree.

" I see this in my dreams." she said.

" What?" he replied.

Her hand came up to softly touch the bark of the glowing apple tree. " This golden glow, like the sun.. no like an moon the color of the sun." Ringo looked down at her feet. " In the form of a river, golden sparks are flying under my feet. "

Ginko stopped completely, his head beginning to spin like it did the first day. _So he was root of all this._ Something in him seemed to break, and out from the crack spilled an ache of realization- the realization that _Ringo could never be part of his story... that he could never hold her forever like he had silently wished to. _

" This reminded me of you, did you know?" Ringo's voice had drifted back into his thoughts.

Ginko looked at her, a pain of his own blooming in his chest. _Don't you understand that I'm the reason why your villagers are ill? Don't you know that the reason for your suffering is me? The mushi have followed me like the plague and I was the one who was foolish enough to ignore them. _He wanted to say.

" This glowing tree and river is just like you, and I feel like there is something very different about the river of light traveling beneath my feet. I feel that if I stare too long at it, I might become sucked in and I won't be able to tear myself apart.." her hands traced incomprehensible patterns into the bark. " That the tree, and you, are holding some secret that I can't know. This tree is beautiful don't you think? I hated it at first, because my father had planted it like an apology before he killed himself... But..."

Ringo slowly turned to look at him.

" In time I learned to love it..." she began to sway unsteadily and it broke Ginko's trance as he rushed forward to catch her before she lost conscious. Her body was warm and feverish and Ginko knew that he should have never let her out. As he scooped her up in his arms, her brown eyes met his green ones and she said,

"..and it became something precious."

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**I hope you all enjoyed chapter two :D chapter three coming soon.. **


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